As a child I always had pets, I remember Jet was a black dog we had, she was a lovely dog and played with us all the time. As she got older she started to lose her sight . One day she snapped at a little girls face and caught her badly. Dad said she could not be trusted after that and had her put to sleep.
The young girl was devastated when she found out what had happened to Jet. She said that she had made Jet jump by coming up to her from behind and it wasn’t the dogs fault at all. We got a little boxer pup next, she was stupid as they are. It was brindle brown and never stopped chewing things, slippers had to be put away in the cupboard when you put your shoes on or they wouldn’t be there when you came back for them. She dashed out into the road one day when the front door was left open and she ended up under a van.
I asked my mum and dad if I could have a pet of my own.
I was bought a pair of guinea pigs as my first pets, they lived indoors in a cage until dad built a hutch to go on top of the coal house for them to live in. They were a male and females and would talk to each other with purrs, whistles and lots of different sounds. Mum called them Gulliver and Lilliput, Lilliput started to get fatter and fatter until she was pear shaped. Mum told me she was having babies, she seemed to be pregnant for ever but it was only ten weeks.When they were born it was so interesting to see the babies, they were miniatures of the adults and would run around within minutes of being born. When it came to six weeks old the babies would come with us on the train to Ormskirk pet shop in Railway road. Mrs Philips the owner would give us food in exchange for the babies, I did not know it but this was the start of a wonderful relationship. In the window of the pet shop would be puppies, tortoise, rabbits, budgies and lots of other things. My grandma Hart would also supply Mrs Philips with tropical fish and plants, she bred them and grew them in big glass tanks in her living room. Grand dad Hart bred budgies in the aviary in the back yard of their house in Hants Lane, these also all ended up in Mrs Philips shop.
I had lots of pets but my favourite was the tortoise, in the summer it would be out on the lawn all day eating the grass and any weeds we could find. I remember seeing them for the first time, lots of them piled two or three high in the shop window and only half a crown each.That is twelve and a half pence in modern money.
Dad painted our house number on the shell of the tortoise in case it wandered of out of the garden. In the winter it was put into a cardboard box with plenty of hay and left to hibernate. The box was put away in the shed and left all winter, I did not know then how wrong this was, it would take another 40 years to find out.
In the middle of the back garden was a wooden pole about six inches square and on the top of this Dad put a barrel that he had converted to make a dovecot. He got a pair of white fan tail pigeons and put them in the dovecot. He put wire netting around the cot so that they would not be able to fly away. Every day he put the ladder up to the dovecot and changed the food and water. Four weeks later they had laid eggs so he said they could be let free. He took me up the ladder to see the two white eggs sat in the bowl he had put in for the hen.
The wire was taken off and I thought they would leave but they stayed and soon we had two little ugly chicks sat in the nest bowl. Soon they were out of the nest and flying around with the parents. The original pair would still feed the babies by giving them food from their own beaks. When they were old enough and feeding themselves Dad caught the two youngsters and swapped them for a pair of tumbler pigeons. These would fly up in the air and then stop flying and tumble towards the ground. They would start flying just before they hit the ground. I thought they were really funny to watch dropping down as if they had been shot. I teased one of my mates by saying that I could shoot them with my fingers. You should have seen his face when I went bang and the pigeon started falling. He was not pleased when I laughed as he ran over to catch it.
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